Tag Archives: doctor who

A Weekend’s Worth of Amusement (Offset by Some Real World News)

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This entry is part 85 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

It’s been a little trying here in the real world. Lots of not-so-great things going on if you pay attention to the news. More not-so-great things going on for some people I give a damn about. ANd my own feelings of utter stagnation really aren’t helping any.

So… To The Internet!

There’s no shortage of feel-good, restore your faith in humanity, mind blowingly cute, utterly hilarious things out there. Thankfully, a lot of those turned up over the past few days. Seems that sharing them has done more than a few people a bit of good.

Of course, there’s also the real world news stuff that I can’t in good conscience completely ignore. (Once a news guy, always a news guy.) But there’s also some genuinely good news of good people doing good things (that whole ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been a small goldmine of creativity and good will) some even doing good things at great risk to themselves (like they guys running aid and rescue missions in the mountains of Iraq).

The world can seem to be a really nasty place. It’s what we’re sold on TV–both in the news and in our entertainment. Visible, violent conflict is exciting (when it’s not happening to you or people you know). It gets eyeballs on the screen, which means eyeballs on the ads, which means money in someone’s pocket. “If it bleeds, it leads” remains true no matter where things are showing up.

But that’s not a fully accurate representation of the world. If it were, we’d all have been dead of one thing or another long, long ago. (And anyone who thought it was a good idea to bring a child into that fully bad world would be struck down by appalled mobs… who’d only be proving how bad things are.)

We’re still here. We’re still moving forward. There are still people fighting the good fight and many, many more quietly changing the world for the better.

Little by little, if we look, the light is there, holding the darkness at bay.

It’s still up to us to look, though. At both sides. To find the balance.

Here’s the feed…

The Doctor, The Terminator, The Panic, and The MacGuffin

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This entry is part 76 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The first thing I noted this morning as I scrolled through the first screen or so of my Facebook feed was the plethora of Doctor Who posts.

I mean, I have a lot of friends who are fans of the good Doctor, so I regularly see a few posts mentioning him every day. But this was more like a full-on Doctor totem pole with multiple posts from multiple people all stacked up. And it wasn’t a FB aggregation thing either–the posts were all reasonably recent and not always immediately adjacent to one another on the feed.

It was a little odd.

Following in the time travel vein, it seems Arnold just wrapped his part in the new Terminator film. The new Terminator film that’s kind of sort of rebooting the franchise to set up a new trilogy. Which they can, technically do. Because time travel. I have my doubts it’ll really be worth it. The movies have been really down hill since Terminator 2 with the all too brief bright spot of the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show being the only thing that really illustrated any actual skill or talent in using the concepts properly.

But, hey, here’s hoping I’m wrong. I do kind of dig the whole Terminator timeline, definitely one of my favorite post-apocalyptic futures.

And speaking of the apocalypse, yeah, there are two people with Ebola in the U.S. Unlike some loud people out there, I’m not particularly worried. Since, y’know, we brought them here on purpose so we can better understand this new strain of the disease. That means they’re being taken care of in facility that’s made to deal with containment and safety. Unlike where these two infected medical professionals picked up their infection. If the treatment they’re experimenting with and the data that they collect works/helps, then maybe we’ll be able to do something about that big breakout in Africa that’s a real thing to worry about.

I have no witty transition for the MacGuffin angle other than to say that a proper cure for something like Ebola wouldn’t make a good one. MacGuffins are, by their very nature amorphous and, ultimately, impotent or inert in and of themselves. Any power they have is distinctly bestowed up them by the people who, for whatever reason, will do anything to get their hands on them (or, in some cases, destroy them). That’s why I was particularly cheesed off by the article in the feed that bitched and moaned about all the MacGuffins being used by Marvel in their Cinematic Universe.

That critic obviously wasn’t paying any attention. Every object that’s come up in a Marvel movie–be it the tesseract/cube from Captain America and the Avengers or the orb/stone from Guardians of the Galaxy or the… goo… from the second Thor movie–has distinct intrinsic power that, in the wrong hands, is shown to be exceptionally dangerous.

That’s not a MacGuffin. That’s not a mere plot device. That’s a full-on plot point. A key thing that, aside from just driving the movie it’s in is also driving the overall meta-plot that spans the multiple movies. Those are genuinely (in the context of the films’ universe) important things.

Not just things with assumed importance.

Like film critics.

Anyway, read it for yourself in the feed…

Awesomecon Flashback, Modified Mario, Elegance, Ramone-less, and Various Other Bits of Stuff from the Weekend

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This entry is part 61 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The weekend wasn’t anywhere near as productive as it should have been.

Sure, I finished off another canceled series or two from my Hulu queue and finally got around to a couple of movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years. Even read things that weren’t being displayed on a screen (I think we call them “books”). But there was more I probably should have done.

There’s a big difference between “should” and “could”, though. I don’t think I legitimately could have been much more productive. I needed the break, as seems to be the case often. Life in the “regular” world by a “normal” schedule just grinds me down more now than it ever has before.

I know there are reasons for that. I’m working through them as best I can. But, well, it’s slow going.

So, instead of being as productive as I “should” be, I do what I can when I can and learn to live with that.

But, there were still a lot of fun links to be had over the past four days.

Here’s hoping you enjoy them.

 

More than a few days worth of stuff (Including science, cats, politics, Fathers Day, and a whole lot of Johnny Cash)

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This entry is part 46 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Not much of an intro today. It was a low-key weekend (after the out-way-too-late game night, at least) and a busy Monday.

It’s going to be hot and humid the rest of the week. Can’t say I care much for that combination. Hopefully, the A/C unit can handle it.

Anyway, on with the catch-up feed…

Community News, Wolverine, a lot of Culture Talk, Some Science, a Little Food, and The Wonder Years Reunion

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This entry is part 37 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I was asked in a comment stream today why I post (or, technically, share… since other people have found most of them first) the articles I do, especially about the whole misogynist culture stuff that’s really being talked about a lot right now.

The answer is simple: Awareness needs to grow.

I know far too many people–myself included–who either are or were blind to how their actions impact the lives of others.

You can’t consciously change things you don’t know you’re doing.

I can’t make anyone improve themselves. But I can at least, maybe, give them some insight into their own actions. (I know, long ago, I was utterly shocked at many of the things I was doing without realizing it.)

We can’t make anyone do anything… not without a whole lot of negatives that outstrip the positives. Plus, unless there’s a critical mass of awareness and will to begin with, forced change never sticks.

This is part of the build up to that critical mass of awareness and will to change.

If just one or two people are shaken awake, realize what they’re doing isn’t what they think they’re doing, and make personal change, then there is progress.

There’s always more than one or two people who are shaken awake.

In the particular case of this issue of entrenched male privileged and misogynist culture, we’re talking about something that is even more entrenched than racism or homophobia. It goes back thousands of years and is built into political discourse and religion like nothing else.

But just because we’ve never known a time that was different, doesn’t mean we can’t try to be better than we (as a species) have ever been before when it comes to equality.

That right there is the beauty of free will and not being trapped and controlled by our biology alone.

So, yeah, I think it’s kind of important.